It looks really interesting but to me it's another one of those games that, too me, has so much detail distraction that I'd get my ass wooped while I try to take in the atmosphere and pay attention to the HUD.

That said, it looks great; and I love the brütal deaths (and even some other things, like your character becoming a walking piece of charcoal if you take a lot of fire damage, or having all the flesh on your upper arm blown off showing your Humerus.)

I was in the closed beta, but only put about 20 hours into it before losing interest. It wasn't a bad game, but the weapon crafting system (at the time) was a real disappointment since most of what you made was useless. There were only a couple builds actually worth using, and most of those were instant/near instant kills. If I wanted that, I'd play some Quake Live instagib. Getting higher tier weapons requires in-game money, which is literally a gamble after every match, and sort of introduces a pay2win element since you can just buy it.

That was about a year ago. I'm sure it's gotten better since then, I just haven't felt like reinstalling. The dev team seemed cool and were really open to feedback when I was playing.

Just tried it out; played three matches and fooled around with the editors so take what I say with a pinch of salt, but...

...I really, really like it so far. The running movement speed is fairly fast for a modern game and in duels there's a fair amount of skill involved with aiming and maneuvering (you can tell that some people really aren't used to it anymore ^^). The two game modes I played were neat, but definitely shouldn't be taken seriously because there's potential RNG factor (I played on the casual queue anyway, apparently the competitive queue has different modes): In Blitz you compete to capture randomly appearing points on the map, and sometimes the points just appear so close to the enemy team that they'll have the point captured before you can even get there to fight them. In Death Snatch people drop items upon death, and you need to collect those and hope that an enemy player doesn't grab it first to deny you the score.

It's also a bit disappointing that the games are limited to max eight players, since some of the maps seem to be tad too large for that. Though if there were more people I suppose the bigger fights would become just an impossible vomit of color...so I guess they should make some of the maps tad smaller. But on an other note, it's cool to see that the maps tend to have plenty of routes and you can utilize the faster speed and higher jumps to get across places that in most games would be impossible.

I have no idea how it'll turn out once more people get in and the no-lives start grinding, but at least for now I'd say it's definitely worth checking out.

yukib1t said:Looks like they took TF2 and made it more raunchy in an attempt to get more laughs.

It's only like TF2 in the loosest sense. It's objective based, but there are no defined classes, which means there's no real "structure" to the games. Even if you don't have a full mix of classes in TF2, you still know what to expect and can come up with a strategy based on what the other team is using. You don't really get that dynamic in Loadout, I thought it made the gameplay seem a bit more shallow. The map design is also much more like traditional multiplayer FPS arenas than a lot of TF2's maps. TF is one of the few series I think pulls off objective-based multiplayer really well, both things I mentioned really play into that.

Definitely raunchier, though.

Jodwin said:I have no idea how it'll turn out once more people get in and the no-lives start grinding, but at least for now I'd say it's definitely worth checking out.

This was already a problem in beta, it's part of why I stopped playing. Of course, this was even before early access so the player base was much smaller. It's probably not going to be nearly as much of an issue now that anyone can play the game.

One nice thing I forgot to mention is that you can swap one of your weapons for any dropped weapon you find. Swapping weapons is nothing new, but given all the different possibilities the crafting system has, the mechanic is a lot cooler than normal. If someone is using something much better than you can make yourself, you do get a chance to even the odds (provided someone can kill them, anyway).

I played it maybe twice for a few hours at a time. The first time I played, I discovered / made some weapon that just felt so completely overpowered that no one could counter it. The second time I played, I used the same game. The gun was so good that it got boring to use.